


Family Outings of the Being A Good Family plans (Unabridged Log)

by josephina_x



Series: AU 'Verse of Nicnac's The Friendship Plan [2]
Category: Smallville, Smallville Season 11 (Comics)
Genre: (but AU to her story), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Crack, F/M, Gen, a Nicnac bounce, mainly gen but follows canon pairings, the OFC is a sibling for Conner so don't fret
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-22
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2017-11-12 16:30:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/493330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a few shorter fics that play fast-and-loose with official canon in the Smallville TV and comics, and mainly builds off of Nicnac's fanon in her Friendship Plan series :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Family Outing #1: The Incredibles

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Plans C Through... Well, He's Bound to Figure It Out Eventually, Right?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/490149) by [Nicnac](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nicnac/pseuds/Nicnac). 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This takes place sometime after Nicnac's [Plan M](http://archiveofourown.org/works/490149/chapters/861369).

~*~*~*~*~*~

"So, whatcha doing?" Conner asked, peering over Lex's shoulder from behind the back of the couch.

Lex glanced behind him, then sighed and held out the notebook from his chest again -- the urge to hide his work-in-progress was well-ingrained. He blamed his artistic sketching background for that one.

Conner frowned a little and tugged at the notebook, and Lex sighed and gave it over.

Conner tilted his head at it as he flipped through a few pages, then said, "I thought Clark got you to promise to cut down on the friendship plans to twice-a-week?"

"I remember no such thing. --Mercy, do you remember such a thing?" Lex scoffed, making a mental note that Clark was apparently ok with up to two friendship-plans a week.

"No, boss," Mercy supplied easily from the armchair, kicked back with cookies and coffee-milk.

"Isn't she supposed to be your bodyguard?" Conner asked, eyeing her.

"I'm on cookie break," Mercy said.

"She's on cookie break," Lex nodded at Conner.

Conner gave them a look like he didn't believe them.

"In point of fact, Conner, those are not friendship plans," Lex said, returning to the earlier thread of discussion.

Conner gave him a funny look, and Lex watched Conner flip to the front cover.

"'Being-a-Good-Family Outings Plans'?" Conner read off incredulously.

Lex nodded. After all, his Being A Good Dad plans might be sponteneous and accidental -- and probably needed to remain so to continue to be effective, given that _trying_ to plan Conner into liking him was manipulative and would probably get him into trouble down the line (read: bite him in the ass) -- but _Clark_ **required** planning, so...

He had it on good authority that most family outings that included young children required careful planning, too, and Conner was only one-and-a-half, after all.

Conner raised an eyebrow, and flipped it open to the first page.

"You're basing these all off of movies and books?" he asked as he quickly scanned through the summary note.

"It's worked out fairly well so far." There was a beat. "For the ones involving you. These will involve you, too."

"...Yeah?" Conner brightened, then bit his lip and asked, "Can I pick one?"

Lex blinked, then leaned back into the couch cushions and said, "Certainly."

Conner smiled, then did a short leap over the back of the couch and bounced down onto the cushions, curling up next to Lex.

Lex watched Conner ropen the notebook and flip through a few more pages, then stop. Conner got a slow grin.

"The Incredibles? Really?"

Lex nodded.

"Have you actually watched that movie?" Conner asked inquisitively.

Lex nodded again.

"Wow," Conner said, grinning. "--I mean, me, too! It's one of my favorites," Conner said, eyeing Lex sideways.

Lex raised an eyebrow or two in surprise at that. "Really? I would have thought you got enough of that with Clark..."

"Well, not really," Conner admitted. "Ma's kind of scary, Lois doesn't want to do Stiletta stuff anymore 'cause she doesn't like other guys checking her out I guess, and the League isn't exactly One Big Happy, y'know?"

"More like One Big Dysfunctional," Mercy snickered. Lex shot her a look.

"But geez, dad, you're one to talk."

Lex frowned at Conner. "What do you mean by that?" he asked.

"Well, aren't you kind of trying to team up and do that stuff with the friendship plans already?"

Lex blinked at Conner in shock. He ignored Mercy's sudden coughing jag, because he was a kind and benevolent employer, and it was entirely possible that those cookies were really horribly dry and she wasn't laughing at him at all.

"That's... not..." Lex sighed deeply, ran a hand over his head, and tried to think of a good way to explain this to his son.

Oh, hell. Lex was afraid that they were going to have to have That Talk.

"...Conner, you know I'm a villain, right?" Lex said tentatively, because he knew Conner identified himself as a Hero, and this sort of thing didn't usually go over well with their lot.

Conner gave him a long look.

"I mean, I'm... reformed. Mostly. But not completely! I'm working on it, but I have relapses. Lots of relapses. Sometimes. A lot." Lex shut up because he realized he was babbling at this point.

Conner looked at him for awhile, then patted him good-naturedly on the shoulder. "Yeah, dad, just keep telling yourself that."

"I'm really not that bad of a villain," Lex grumbled despondently as Conner kept paging through his notes. "I could be _much_ worse."

"I think he meant the other one, boss," Mercy supplied helpfully.

"He did? --You did?" Lex asked Mercy, then Conner.

"Uh, yeah?" Conner said. "You're kinda a big softie."

...And now Lex felt a little offended. His villainy had been considered subpar, and by his own son, no less!

"Ooh, you shouldn't do that, kid," Mercy said with a sympathetic hiss. "Now he's gonna feel honor-bound do do some major villainy on you."

"What?" Conner said, glancing up and giving Mercy a weird look.

"Mercy!" Lex hissed in consternation.

"Well, he is a kid, and _your_ kid, boss," Mercy said. "Shouldn't you go easy on him?"

"My son does not need a handicap!" Lex glared at her, crossing his arms in a huff.

"Uh, can I get a say in this?" Conner asked, glancing between them worriedly.

"No!' Lex said. Then he shook himself and said, "Maybe. --Aaah, I don't know!" he ended, throwing up his hands in irritation.

"Um, mind explaining that reaction, dad?" Conner asked, with a 'what the hell did I miss this time?' look.

Lex scrubbed at his face with his hands. "It's not a mised social cue, Conner, it's... a Lionel thing," he ended miserably.

Mercy glanced at Conner and winced in sympathy.

"Um," said Conner. "Do I wanna know?"

"I have yet to have read a parenting book that has explained adequately whether recounting Lionel's particular quirks to you or not will result in scarring you for life and needing years of therapy," Lex said grumpily.

"Uh, shouldn't that be 'whether or not'?" Conner asked.

"No," said Lex. "Apparently under normal circumstances, exposure to one's elder relatives, or sharing stories about them if they are not available, is supposed to be helpful to a child's development, and withholding such may also scar you for life--"

"Ok, catch-22, I read that book," Conner interrupted. "We're not normal, I think we get a pass on that one," Conner said, crossing his arms.

"Hm. You think so?" Lex asked.

"Yes," Conner said authoritatively.

"...How many parenting books have _you_ read?" Lex asked Conner, eyeing him, because he had sounded _very_ certain -- suspiciously so.

Mercy started making the dry-cough-that-wasn't-covering-a-laugh sounds again.

"Um. Not the point. I'm the kid. We don't have to read those," Conner said hurriedly. "Um. Forget handicaps. No handicap-talk anymore. Howabout a warning, instead? Just a warning? Can I get warnings?" Conner asked hopefully. "That's not a handicap, right?"

Lex gave Conner a long look. Then he thought about it awhile.

"...Warnings are acceptable," Lex said finally.

Conner blew out a big sigh of relief and gave Lex a huge grin, collapsing back onto the couch.

"Timetable, sir?" Mercy asked, ever the pragmatist.

"Until he's eighteen and an adult," Lex supplied.

"Which eighteen, sir?"

Lex nearly rolled his eyes. Wasn't it obvious? "The actual-time-he's-spent-outside-a-tube one, not the 'guess at a physical age' one, Mercy," he replied with heavy derision.

"Awesome!" Conner practically yelled, pumping both fists in the air.

Lex eyed his son's enthusiasm and wondered what _he'd_ missed this time.

Mercy got up to put her food remnants away -- her cookie break was over.

"So, Incredibles, huh?" Conner said, nearly bouncing in place.

"If you'd like," Lex said easily. He did already have a volcano 'lair', after all. He could fill it with death traps and killer-robots to fight off easily enough, couldn't he?

"Great!" Conner said. Then he paused. "Wait -- does this mean I get a sister, first?"

...Lex revised the timetable on that one by a few decades. With his track record, finding a wife who could hold off acting on their homicidal urges for nine months was going to be damn-near impossible.

"Or are we going to call Kara up in the future and ask her to fill in, instead?"

\--On second thought, if he revived the Lx-cloning project and gang-jumped Clark with blue-K and Mercy at the annual Daily Planet barbecue tomorrow afternoon, then swung by STAR Labs and sweet-talked Hank Henshaw a bit -- he must be bored with staring at the walls as a head by now and, really, who didn't like a little revenge now and then? -- and broke Henshaw out while 'liberating' half a dozen of those spare robotic bodies and a wireless remote link-up unit along with him, he'd probably be able to get that one settled within a week or two...

~*~*~*~*~*~


	2. Family Outing #1: Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well, that went well. Conner has a new sibling, and the Family Plans now have a track record of 1-0 with a lead in Not-Thwarted attempts! Hurray!
> 
> Now, on to the next one... *rubs hands together and cackles all mock-evil-like*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This takes place sometime after Nicnac's [Plan O](http://archiveofourown.org/works/490149/chapters/862842). (Hers is the main 'verse; mine is an AU of hers, which I have permission to play in! *big grins*) In this quasi-shared 'verse timeline, this fic now follows in the aftermath of [a birthday fic Nicnac wrote for me recently (squee!)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/921263). I would definitely recommend reading hers, but whether you read it before or after this chapter is up to you :)

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex sighed as he finished typing up his final notes on the Incredibles plan, and decided to review the videolog he'd pieced together from the island security cams one more time.

All-in-all, it hadn't gone too badly. Lex had tried to get a blood sample while Mercy held him down, but they'd gotten reamed out by Perry and Lois for it. Luckily, that had been a distraction from the actual plan, and Lex had walked away with a single hair... until Chloe had stopped him and made him give it over.

However, that had been a distraction from the double-reacharound plan, because Mercy had gotten a hair, too, and _she_ got away with it by hiding it in her own headband because she was a brunette herself, and because the League obviously knew that Lex would have entrusted Clark's DNA with a mere in-the-dark employee.

Some days it really paid for the 'good guys' not to know that your bodyguard-cum-chaffeur-cum personal assistant knew your nemesis-soon-to-be-friend's secret Hero identity, too.

He felt rather bad about Henshaw at this point -- the man really was cooped up in the back room of that lab with nothing to do, and his wife had a job and could only come by so often to keep him company. Henshaw had come across as rather lonely and bored and a little depressed. He hadn't jumped at the chance to get out, and Lex had worried about what had effectively been a forced-kidnapping, but Hank had lightened up significantly once Lex had actually gotten him out and about. Lex resolved to keep him in mind for future evil robot plans. He'd done an admirable job on the volcano island, and his acting had been superb -- he'd really gotten into the spirit of things towards the end there.

Clark had been less-than-thrilled to have a new biological-child sprung on him again, and even less so about her needing 'rescue', but he'd gotten over it quickly enough.

He'd been even less-than-thrilled to find out later that _Lex_ had been the one to create said child on purpose, _not_ the 'evil mastermind who'd taken over his island', nor how he was putting young children in danger, despite the fact that Lex had made sure that they'd all been armored up in suits made with the _good_ -quality flak jacket material -- black and red, not purple, at Conner's begging request. It hardly bore mentioning that Hank was a very responsible adult who had gotten a lot of therapy about the whole being-a-robot-now thing and didn't fly off the handle like that anymore -- not that it hadn't been completely understandable, as he'd been severely traumatized by the experience at the time.

Lex was used to this sort of thing from Clark by now, but Hank had gotten a bit angry over that one, and it served Clark right, too -- it was high time he'd learned that accusations like that hurt people's feelings.

All-in-all, it had worked out quite well.

Although a _certain_ Kryptonian had been _very_ unhappy to discover that a certain five-year-old-girl-child was already capable of flight, Lex was rather disappointed to find out.

Lex sat back in his lounge chair on the back patio of the Smallville mansion and wrote to the sound of loud happy laughter, and a higher-pitched giggling intersperced with somewhat realistic biplane noises.

Lex looked over his sunglasses at their antics and smiled slightly at them as he watched Lara Luthor tow her big brother around the back lawn by the wrists. Conner's feet were clearing the ground by only about a foot, and they were only traveling at about five miles an hour or so, but Conner had a grin a mile wide and was clearly loving every minute of it.

Well, at least one big brother loved his little sis to pieces. And vice-versa.

Honestly, Lex didn't know what Clark's major malfunction was about her. Lex had thought she was the _perfect_ age for thwarting evil schemes and messing up the plans of evil masterminds -- hell, she'd probably been the safest of them all! She wasn't going to miss out on kindergarten, which Conner had said was a big deal and Lex had taken him at his word, and she was certainly old enough to be able to converse effectively with all of them, another suggestion from Conner that had turned out to be a good idea. Really, what was wrong with being five?

Lex shook his head and shut down his computer system, setting it to the side as Lara floated Conner over.

Conner and Lara let go of each other, their palms and fingers slipping by each other as Conner dropped the short foot to the ground.

Then Lara giggled, floated herself up and over him by a few more feet, turned upside down a little to stare him in the eye, smirked... and then let gravity take over.

Conner, surprised, nearly dropped her when she fell into his arms. He recovered quickly, held her at armslength for a moment, staring, then got a smirk of his own pulled her in close, saying, "Brat!!" affectionately. He started tickling her mercilessly, grinning up a storm as she shrieked and giggled and squirmed but couldn't get away. She might be able to float when he couldn't yet, but that involved actually getting away first, and Conner had the advantage of super-speed and a firm grip.

Lex stoically didn't laugh at this scene.

Mercy sighed slightly at their crazy Luthor antics as she finished helping the Cook lay out the table for lunch.

After awhile, both his children ended up on the patio bricks, panting with giggles -- Lara had finally discovered that turn about was fair play and been just as merciless about it as her older Luthor brother -- and Lex got up and leaned over them.

"Go wash your hands before lunch," he said, but instead of prompting a rush indoors, Conner grinned, scooped up Lara, and dashed off to the side of the garden shed in a visual blur.

It took Lex a moment of looking about to spot them over by the water spigot, cleaning up.

Lex saw Conner splash a little water at Lara, and she blinked, astonished, and slapped at the water stream to try and get him wet back. She only got him with a few droplets, but he immediately retaliated with another stronger redirect that left her sputtering and coughing.

Lex got up and made his way over, frowning.

...And it wasn't long before there was an all-out water battle going on with one bucket and two hoses and three peals of intermittent laughter interspersed with shrieks of "aah!" and "cold!" and "I'll get you for that!"

Before the two children and their grumbling-to-cover-his-chuckling parent managed to take their places around the luncheon spread, they were all soaked completely through, and their clothes were probably going to be ruined from all the grass stains and dirt and mud, but by god their hands were clean.

Mercy rather professionally ignored the lot of them, focusing on her sandwich.

~*~*~*~*~*~

After they'd eaten and all gotten cleaned up again, they retired to the library for some quiet reflection and reading. Conner was on the floor in front of the fireplace reading to Lara -- who was perfectly capable of reading herself but seemed to love it when her big brother indulged her anyway, Lex figured it had something to do with all the attention and the surreptitious cuddling going on while she got to sit in his lap -- while Lex was curled up on the couch with his various Plans notebooks, casually scribbling away. Mercy was leaning against the wall by the double-doors, on relaxed watch.

"Hey, dad?" Lex heard after awhile.

He looked over to see that Conner and Lara had joined him on the couch, Conner holding Lara easily in his arms like he'd been doing it for years, not just a little over a week.

"Yes, Conner?'

"You working on the plans again?"

Lex smiled.

"Is it the family ones? Are we doing another one again soon?" Conner asked, perking up.

Lex gave him a relaxed shrug and sighed. "I'll have to rework several of them so that your sister can be included," Lex started. "But no, most of them aren't viable yet."

"Aw," Lara pouting.

"Sorry dad, it's just that I was kinda telling Lara about some of them and she really wanted to pick one next," Conner explained apologetically.

Lex blinked and made a mental note to remember that Conner apparently had either Lex's own excellent memory, or Clark's eidetic one.

"Was there any one on particular that you liked best?" Lex asked Lara, who peeked up at him and suddenly became very shy, shaking her head and burying her face into Conner's shoulder, but still peeking out at him a little bit.

"Um, not any one in particular, exactly, 'cause she doesn't get most of the references yet."

The slight stress Conner put on 'one' was not missed by the master of subtext.

"Hm," Lex said, looking down at his daughter again. "Lara," he asked carefully, "was there anything in particular that you liked most about some of those plans?"

"Yes!" Lara exclaimed with animation, her eyes lighting up, before she remembered she was being shy and hid herself against Conner's chest again.

Lex reched out and stroked her hair gently. Lara giggled a little and squirmed.

"What did you like best?" Lex asked her lightly, as he continued playing with her hair.

"The-- the aliens," Lara stuttered out, and Lex caught a glimpse of a deep blush painting her cheeks pink, before she turned away and completely hid her face in Conner's shirt. Lex supposed that she took after Clark a bit more in the embarrassment department than Conner did.

"Hm, aliens," Lex said. "I suppose they do figure a little prominently in my plans, don't they?" he added. "You know, _I_ like them, too," he said, leaning in and whispering conspiratorily, wth a wink up at Conner, who apparently was about as immune to giving blushes and eyerolls as Clark was, under the right circumstances.

"Most of them kind of involved... um... _fighting_ the aliens, though," Conner said a little nervously, shifting in place and hugging Lara a little closer.

Lara giggled into Conner's chest. Ah, a daughter after his own heart.

"Oh, well," Lex waved off. "It's just pretend, though. We'd have to find friendly aliens who'd want to play along."

"Oh," said Conner, then, "Ohhhh..." Lex watched him relax. A lot.

Lex made an executive decision. "Conner, I promise that I won't try and force you or your sister to take part in any family plans that you don't want to do, all right? -- _Any_ plans that you don't want to," he amended quickly.

"...Really?" said Conner.

"Really," Lex promised firmly.

Conner brightened significantly at that. "Thanks, dad," he said quietly.

Lex ruffled Conner's hair and smiled.

"Um..." Conner said tentatively.

"Yes, son?" Lex said, and though it felt a little weird that he could say that, it was a good kind of weird, he felt.

"Does Clark get a say in his participation, too?"

"He usually does whether I have anything to say about it or not," Lex sighed grumpily. Conner bit his lip and smiled back weakly.

"Well!" Lex said, clapping his hands together and deciding to leave that topic well-behind them, because it was a little too depressing and he shouldn't be drinking like a fish in front of his children -- it would set a bad example. "An aliens plan, hm? Anything else you might like?"

"Mmm--" said Lara, poking her head out again. "Metropolis?" Then she paused and added, "Evil alien invaders! _BOOM!_ " she yelled, throwing her hands up in the air and then collapsing against Conner again, giggling.

"--But no evil Kryptonians," Conner added in a rush, looking a little worried.

"No, no, of course not," Lex assured Conner. "Most Kryptonians besides Clark don't like to play nice, and I'd like the 'lines of battle' to be rather unmuddied." The last thing he needed was Clark trying to play nice and be all diplomatic right smack dab in the middle of his war games simulation, or even worse, join the other side.

...Wait, why had he thought 'war games simulation'? --Oh hell, he'd been letting the Martian Manhunter talk him up far too much. Christ, the stupid League. He was _not_ joining up, damnit, thought why J'onn couldn't keep that in his squishy Martian head he'd never understand. Too many Oreos and not enough milk, maybe. ...Christ -- at _best_ , Lex would only ever even _consider_ \--

Lex froze, struck by inspiration, as so very many things suddenly rose up in a wave and clamored for his attention all-at-once. His eyes widened.

"...Uh, dad?" he heard faintly.

All the disparate pieces of the marvelously intricate masterwork that was his newest plan finally slid together with a nearly-audible mental 'snap!'

Lex, staring off into the distance, slowly started to grin.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	3. Family Outing #2: War Of The Worlds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A week-and-a-half later...
> 
> Lex puts his plan(s) in motion. :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Directly follows Chapter 2 (after Plan O, before Plan P).

~*~*~*~*~*~

A week-and-a-half later, Lex found himself running down the streets of Metropolis like a madman with the devil behind him giving chase.

He cursed and ducked down an alleyway, then plastered himself against the wall.

His pursuer turned the corner a little too roughly, and Lex tripped the damn thing, watching dispassionately as it got tangled up in all six legs and went tumbling ass-over-teakettle. Or, hm, thorax-over-whatever-passed-for-a-teakettle for an alien like this.

He calmly stepped up to it and beat in its head with a baseball bat with great relish.

And then he sighed as it faded out into nothing.

::J'onn, problem?:: he asked on the mental uplink. He'd been hoping for a little more realism on the blood and gore from the mental projection the telepath would give him. He'd been pretty damn excellent at the first twenty or so...

He wondered if he could talk the Manhunter into doing this with him more often -- he was finding it _very_ therapeutic.

::Apologies, Alexander,:: J'onn replied. ::But I am currently having some difficulty keeping Clark occuppied and unsuspicious--::

::Ah,:: thought Lex. He'd always thought Clark rather oblivious, and had only asked the Martian Manhunter to try and steer him away -- just a _touch_ \-- from thoughts of this not being 'for keeps' only out of completeness. He'd had a gut feeling that Clark wouldn't want to take it seriously, otherwise. ...Of course, it could also be the strain of keeping up with Clark's perception of his adversaries fast enough to match Clark's super-speed, too.

::--and a few of the other League members have now arrived,:: J'onn continued.

Oh. Well, that would explain it, too. Stupid Clark, calling in the whole gang.

...Well, actually, technically _smart_ Clark, really. Lex put a mental gold star in Clark's column.

"Dad?" he heard over his commlink.

"Yes, Conner?" Lex said.

"Um..." there was a pause. "Status report?"

Lex cursed himself. He'd made Conner team leader on this one -- he really shouldn't forget things like that. "Sorry, fearless leader," he said with a grin he kept out of his professional tone, "The bomb didn't go off like we'd thought." The 'bomb' wasn't real, just 'simulated' as well, as were several other weapons they were each toting -- well, the projectile ones, anyway. His bat was perfectly real, for one. "Their hive prime didn't get caught in the blast, and I had a little trouble disposing of it."

The Primes were 'souped up' versions of the soldier grunts in this scenario, some with special abilities on par with the League members. Luckily for him, the one chasing him had had Oliver's brains, not Bart's speed.

"You ok?" he heard Lara ask.

Huh. He even thought he heard 'explosions' in the background. J'onn was _really_ on top of this.

"I'm fine; heading back now. --What's your location?" he asked, sliding his baseball bat back up over his back and letting the magnetic strips lock it in place.

"Corner of Main and 7'th, ground level, heading for Central Park. Got a real big invasion force landing by the pond."

"Battle plan, ETA, and size?" Lex queried, rounding the corner carefully. He neither saw nor heard any directed audio-visual hallucinations of their mentally-projected 'alien enemy' from the Martian, so he assumed he was 'in the clear' -- for now.

"We're finding a good position for an ambush and they're, um, something like three minutes out? And... well, Lara spotted them from the air, and--"

"--bigger than ten?" Lex said, remembering the size and viewability of the hive-ships that he'd worked out with J'onn -- mostly-transparent from the top, and showing up as a dead zone to attempted x-ray vision from the bottom. He pushed off into a run, and then really began stretching his legs in a full-out sprint. He could make the park in seven minutes, easily -- five if he pushed it.

"--bigger than ten," Conner sighed, and Lex was doubly-reminded that they hadn't quite gotten to counting higher than ten with her yet, mostly because said counting sessions tended to get derailed with giggling and shenanigans from their youngest. It wasn't that she wasn't getting it -- she was perfectly intelligent -- she just... wasn't as content to quietly sit still and read and learn things for hours on end as the two of them were. --Not that there was anything wrong with that! It was just a little different than Lex was used to dealing with.

Conner was just as brimming full of energy as she was, but when he sat down and got into things, he _got into things_. It was like a switch flipped and redirected all that physical energy into mental instead, and Lex _got_ that, because he was the same way. He just worried that Lara might feel like the odd girl out, having such different needs in how she felt most happy about expressing herself.

"Bigger than five tens," Conner added, and Lex blinked and mentally slapped himself. _**Of course** my daughter is smarter than that,_ he thought with a smile. He shouldn't have been the least bit surprised at all.

"And Superman?" Lex asked between breaths as he pounded the pavement, ignoring the stared as he dodged and weaved down the street between the pedestrian traffic.

"Ugh," said Conner. "J'onn finally cut him out of our play-loop and distracted him with a huge landing group across town. He kept 'poaching' our 'kills'," he said disgustedly. "Is there a reason why we aren't telling him it's a game, or are we _wanting_ him to be a jerk about not wanting me in charge or letting any of us try to help out?"

Lex needed to conserve his breath for running, so he let J'onn relay for him. Useful, that. ::"Just be glad that we're not all seeing the same thing, or you'd be getting a hysterical lecture about all life being sacred, even if it's trying its absolute best to kill you, and isn't even real,":: he had J'onn relay as 'verbal talk', and got a long groan in return. Where Conner only saw blossoming colored zones of damage so he could concentrate on inertia and physics and mass with the aliens as strength-control-practice, Lara saw everything as Looney-Tunes cartoon-like wobbling and reinflating-with-a-pop! 'hits' instead. Lex, conversely, saw highly-realistic blood-and-bone-fragments-and-guts, and Clark would, too... if he actually ever hit anything that hard.

Well, Lex did for his own 'kills', anyway. He was seeing what his children saw for their own opponents, at his own request, when he got within range of them, and he had his own views of his opponents adjusted accordingly. He didn't want them disturbed at his behavior. He also didn't want to be caught flatfooted if they saw something that disturbed them somehow -- if they did, he wanted to know what it was so he could do something about it.

But Clark was on a completely different wavelength, a little like the kids, only _his_ included a 'gloss over' a la J'onn that kept him from really seeing what any of them were actually doing, or he would've been all over them for the headshots, 'bombs', and 'hitting too hard'.

The universal rule was that all kills -- and only kills -- vanished in a 'puff of smoke' after a minute or two, and weapons could be salvaged for only up to another two minutes after that.

Oh, and that apparently Clark took the fun out of everything.

 _Clearly_ Clark wasn't enough of a geek to appreciate what was, in effect, a pretty damn awesome LARP session writ-large across the entire city. Lex had been planning on filling him in once he'd gotten into it, figuring it'd be harder for him to say no once he was invested, but... well, obviously he hadn't gotten into it. Lex had thought that leaving Clark with the kids while he took Conner's 'side quest' would have given Clark some quality time with them, and time in general to cool down once Lex was out of his hair. Lex had _thought_ that once Clark was calm enough, he'd look around and realize that their 'enemy' was pretty damn inept and not all that worrying -- really, what sort of alien invasion put down landing parties on the ground when they could just attack from orbit? -- but... apparently Clark really _was_ that oblivious, in all the worst ways, after all.

Lex mentally shook himself, and slowed his all-out run down to a jog as he approached the park.

"Position?" he asked Conner over the comm, and then he suddenly found himself airborne.

Lex barely managed to stifle a very unmanly yelp, and soon enough he found himself up on a rooftop next to his three children.

Clark looked about as pissed-off as a wet cat. Probably because he was as _wet_ as a wet cat.

"Would somebody like to explain to me exactly what's going on?" Clark said, arms crossed as he glared down the three Luthors. Lex took in a breath, and winced when Clark immediately continued with, " _I_ think maybe we should start with why no-one else in the city seems to be seeing the aliens we're fighting, and why I didn't realize this until a shopkeeper got me with a bucket and a lecture on fighting invisible air in front of his store?" he gritted out.

::The jig is up,:: he told J'onn. ::You might want to get going while the going's still good...::

So Lex was a little more than surprised when J'onn 'materialized' out of nowhere right next to him on the rooftop.

::Uh, ok then. Nice to see you with us, Manhunter,:: Lex thought at him -- confused at his presence, but not going to argue it.

::The points you made during our original discussion still stand as valid,:: J'onn thought at him calmly.

::...This is true,:: Lex admitted. ::But Clark's never really been one for logic--::

::Then it's high-time he learned some.::

Lex blinked at J'onn a few times. _Well, ok then._ He was going to have backup in a discussion with Clark? That would be... new.

Lex turned back to Clark, said, "I asked J'onn to set up a War-Of-The-Worlds-type scenario for us all to play through as a family, since he's our resident Martian. Surprise."

And then Lex waited patiently for the explosion. It didn't take long.

Clark stared at him dumbly for a moment, then took a deep breath and rocked back on his heels.

"How could you possibly think that this was a good idea!?" Clark demanded, irate.

"Family? Bonding time? Usually a good idea?" Lex supplied.

"That is not the problem!" Clark yelled at him, apparently not seeing Conner's eyes go wide or how Lara ducked into her big brother's arms with a slight frown, watching his tirade intensely.

"Then what is?" Lex asked calmly.

"Oh, I don't know! As a start? _Maybe_ the part where half the city probably thinks I'm insane, now, and the rest of the planet will, too -- any second now, if they don't already -- once they finish browsing Youtube!" Clark said angrily, but under that anger Lex heard fear.

Lex sighed and said, "J'onn, could you drop the _entire_ setup in just this area, please?"

"Of course."

Clark stared, aghast.

"...What the hell are you wearing?" Superman finally asked him weakly -- as if he had any right to talk.

"A spacesuit," Lex supplied. "Well, technically it's a work-in-progress; it's not fully-functional yet," he dissembled, glancing down at his liquid-black outfit that was half-bodysuit, half-powered-armor, although the functionality of the 'powered' bits was very limited in this iteration.

He took off the futuristic-looking helmet and clipped it to his belt. Conner and Lara were wearing similar outfits to his in a matching design, but with little red-S-shields at their shoulders. They all were obviously not dressed for _anything_ that would be considered run-of-the-mill or merely 'ordinary'.

This was made even more apparent by the words "TRAINING EXERCISE" in bold, bright-white across their chests (and backs, too, if Clark sped into super-speed to look).

"Why are you wearing... spacesuits?" Clark asked dimly.

"Well, you see, Clark," Lex said smoothly, "When one fights aliens, and will generally end up in orbit--"

"We're gonna go into space?" Conner yelped, eyes going comically-wide.

Lex winced and addressed his eldest. "Ah, no. Not... quite. It was an optional part of the scenario -- stealing a ship and taking it up into 'orbit' -- if we got that far and decided to take that route. J'onn would have maneuvered us to a gymnasium I'd rented out for the day. There would have been a few zero-g maneuvers at one point, thanks to his telekineticism."

"We're gonna take over an alien spaceship in space," Conner said dreamily. Lara giggled at poked him in the cheek.

"Not today," Lex sighed, glancing at Clark. "I think we're done for today."

"Yes. You are." Clark said under his breath. "I'm noting that I didn't get a spacesuit."

"No, you seemed to object strongly to changing your outerwear last time, so I thought it a moot point to try, but we did put signs on you as well," Lex supplied, and that had been a lot easier to pull off with J'onn's telekinetic powers than Lex had thought it would be. Then he frowned and added, "Mm, well, you _had_ one on your front..."

"It may have torn off on one of the occasions when he hit the pavement, earlier," J'onn supplied, and Lex gave him a sideways look. He began to wonder exactly how 'intense' a new session J'onn had decided to make for him, once he'd hared him halfway across the city and been out of range of the rest of them.

"That was probably why someone finally stopped you," Lex added casually. "Maybe the man didn't see you from the back, or wasn't wearing his glasses -- how old did you say that shopkeeper was?" he asked innocently.

"That isn't--" Clark gritted his teeth. "That's not really the main problem here, Lex."

"Then what is?" Lex asked cooly.

"You lied to me. _Again._ Twice now!" Clark gritted out, fists clenched, eyes flashing red. "You didn't even do me the common courtesy of giving me a _choice_ , you--"

Lex felt his head start to tilt upwards and he had to force himself to lower it again and try to remain calm. "I offered you a choice about the island--" he said evenly.

"You _lied!_ That does _not_ make it--"

"--all right, Clark, _yes_ , I _lied_ to you. How absolutely _horrible_ that I did so, about madmen and aliens, and oh, boo hoo, it turned out that there was really _no_ danger after all, and _no-one_ got hurt because of it--" Lex spat out, sing-song, because Clark was fucking pushing all his buttons, and he could only hold back so much, so long.

Clark reared back like he was slapped, then spat back, "Don't give me that!" because the man wasn't stupid -- he knew _exactly_ what Lex was so angry about, still, after all this time, that a simple apology could not fix.

But then, defensive to the nines like he always was, Clark went too far. "And don't act like you would have even _had_ Lara if--"

Lex saw a red tinge around the edges of his vision, and he got up in Clark's personal space, damn near incoherent with rage and wanting nothing more than to punch in his face just then. He only barely managed to rein himself in, because his children were standing _right fucking there_ and hitting people who were idiots generally did not solve one's problems, and did not make them any less idiots, and he could not let his children ever think that that was not the case -- that it was ok to be a bully like Oliver-fucking-Queen because you were bigger and stronger and angry and _could_.

So instead Lex hammered it all down, hard, white-hot to thin-ice-cold, breath ragged as he glared daggers up at Clark and he decidedly did _not_ turn it into a physical confrontation.

"I had Lara because I wanted a daughter, and Conner wanted a little sister," Lex informed him. "I _wanted_ her," he repeated, poking Clark in the chest, hard. "I still want her. She is _my daughter_ , and I will _always_ want her. Don't you _dare_ to suggest otherwise. _Ever._ " He rasped out.

"The _only_ bearing that that particular 'family plan' had on _anything_ concerning her _at all_ , was that it brought up the discussion in the first place," Lex ended lowly, shivering with adrenaline-rage that had nowhere to go.

Clark was leaning away from him, had taken a step back, eyes wide.

"If I had given you what you consider to be a 'fair choice', then and now, would you have come?" Lex pressed, flatly.

Clark remained silent.

"I see," Lex said quietly, raising his chin a little higher and glaring at Clark, because how the hell else was he supposed to take that?

What was worse was that he'd thought -- hoped -- that he was more wrong than right. He'd somehow thought that maybe he'd not been giving Clark enough of a chance, that maybe he should have...

"You can't just _do_ these things, Lex--"

" _Family_ isn't _optional_ , Clark," Lex spat back at him. "But if you truly want to choose, then by all means, I will be _happy_ to inform you of this family's games, so you can decide whether or not you want to join us at your leisure."

"That _isn't--_ " Clark started, looking pained and glancing back at Lex's children.

"No, no," Lex continued, waving a hand. " _Please_ don't feel obligated to bother yourself if you find playing real-life videogames with us so distasteful--"

"Videogames?!?" Clark yelped and as his voice went up three octaves, Lex winced and wondered if that was the killer-not-a-song-power finally starting to kick in. "Videogames are violent--!"

 _Oh-my-god,_ Lex thought. "Oh yes Clark, sitting on a couch pressing buttons and yelling at a TV screen makes _killers of us all_ ," he drawled out sarcastically. "And Hero work, why, _that_ isn't violent _at all_." While Clark sputtered, he added, "Really, I am _such_ a horrible influence on my children for spending time with them, rather than throwing them down in front of an electronic babysitter and some truly gory material, or letting them run wild in the streets chasing down dangerous criminals without any adult supervision--"

"You ran off!"

Lex twitched.

"I left them _to you_ , **temporarily** , per your 'request' that I stop involving myself in alien invasions, thinking that you would stay with them. _You_ were there, until _you_ ran off," Lex shot back coldly.

"The aliens were gone, I took care of them there because I needed to--" then Clark ground to a halt and rubbed at his face as he remembered the aliens weren't real.

Lex took the opportunity to also remind him that: "J'onn was watching over them so closely he was literally inside their heads--" he stopped dead at Clark's near-snarl. "...You don't think J'onn capable of proper adult supervision?" he said, eyebrows raising.

" _ **NO**_ ," Clark stated, glaring at J'onn, and Lex swore J'onn was letting him damn-near feel the mental buzz of anger and apology shooting between them at the periphery of his perception, though for what reason he would do so, Lex couldn't fathom.

What was odd was that the _direction_ of each of those emotions was the exact opposite of what Lex would ever have expected.

Lex rocked back on his heels, glancing between the two aliens.

"Right," Lex said quietly. He took a deep breath, and thought... "So, just to be clear, you do _not_ want to participate in this sort of training scenario with us, or any other similar." 

"No, I don't," Clark said, then blinked as Lex reached up and snapped a bracelet around his wrist.

"What the--" Clark said confused, then "--Hey!!!" as Lex yanked his League-comm earpiece out of his ear and unsnapped his belt, one-hand and one-quick-motion each, then danced backwards out of reach.

 _Vengeance is **mine** ,_ Lex thought with a thin smile and dancing eyes. He wondered if Batman felt like this a lot.

"Lex, what the _hell--_ " Clark said, stumbling forward, then he stopped and straightened slowly, staring at the bracelet. "Blue Kryptonite?" he said, it slowly dawning on him _why_ he'd stumbled -- super-speed no longer being accessible to him.

"That's riiight!" Lex confirmed with a shit-eating-grin. "Oh, Lara dear..." he said in a half-song voice, glancing over at her.

Lara perked up in Conner's arms.

"I know your other father's been misbehaving a bit, but would you still like to play a game with him?"

Lara looked at Lex, then glanced over at Clark, then looked back at Lex with a glitter in her eye and pushed off of Conner, floating a foot or two away.

Lex slowly smiled.

Conner looked vaguely worried.

So did Superman.

"...Lex?"

Lex tossed Lara the comm-earpiece and the belt in quick succession, and Lara caught them neatly.

"Ah, you've been practicing playing 'catch' with Conner," Lex said happily.

Lara nodded.

"...Would you like to practice playing 'keep away' with Clark?"

Lara got a mad gleam in her eyes and a maniacal grin.

 _Oh yes, **definitely** my kid,_ Lex thought with pride.

"Uh oh," Conner said quietly.

Clark straightened and looked a little freaked, understandably. "Lara..." he said warningly.

Lara turned in the air to face Clark and got a competely-innocent wide-eyed look that fooled absolutely nobody.

"Lara, those are not yours. Give them back, right now," Clark said authoritatively, holding out a hand.

Lara slowly drew the items to her chest, watching him.

Clark leaned towards Lara slightly, then back again, jaw clenching and unclenching slightly.

Lara stared at him.

Clark stared back.

Clark broke first.

Lex, Conner, and J'onn watched Clark chase Lara around the rooftop for a bit, Lara laughing hysterically as Clark self-censored what passed for curses for him, before Lara swooped through down the roof-stairwell access door and down the staircase, with Clark close behind.

Clark never had a chance, really. Lara had been learning 'tag' and 'keep away' from Conner most afternoons they'd spent together at the mansion thus far, and Conner had been moving at slow super-speed. Even if Lara's floating hadn't improved much -- and it had -- she'd learned to dodge well enough that even _Conner_ had trouble grabbing her without 'cheating' by upping his speed a bit... or planning out a very sneaky ambush and pouncing her from above with a well-timed super-jump.

"Uh, dad..." Conner said, shifting from foot to foot nervously.

"It's fine," Lex waved off. "She'll go easy on him. ...And he'll stay with her." Lex added belatedly at the look on Conner's face. "Besides, he's not the only one watching over her." He had a friendly eye in the sky for that, not to mention J'onn.

"That wasn't-- ...ok, yeah, it kind of was, too, but I mean..." Conner grimaced as he rubbed the back of his neck and reordered his thoughts. "I just... did you know he was going to say no?" he asked finally, watching Lex carefully.

Lex felt a little miserable. "No," he said quietly. "I thought it might be somewhat unlikely, but... I never thought it would be an outright no. Even when I've brought up friendship plans with him, he..." Lex trailed off, and then he winced, rethinking a few things from what was probably a little closer to Clark's perspective.

"...Dad?"

"I'm an idiot," Lex said, staring down at the gravel of the rooftop in disgust. "Clark isn't thrilled about most of my friendship plans as it is, and he's been saying 'no' a great deal more lately. He might've thought that these family plans were an attempt to force him to join in as a sort of emotional blackmail that he couldn't say no to." And, god help him, Lex wasn't sure if he'd actually put it together that way on purpose or not. ...No, no, damnit, he'd wanted them all together more for the kids than himself. It was different.

Conner winced, and Lex continued. "I'll think of something else. I should've realized that expecting him to want to join in for family plans when he didn't even feel that way about friendship plans was a gross oversight. I..." Lex sighed and ran a hand over his head. "Maybe we can split them up, somehow. Family plans with the three of us, and an alternate set with the three of you. I'm sure he'll be more amenable if I'm not included when you and Lara are," he ended.

"Dad..." Conner said.

"It's fine, Conner," Lex sighed. He scrubbed at his face and asked J'onn, "How many League members are in the city currently?" It wasn't as though he'd forgotten that Clark must have called them in earlier.

"Five," J'onn supplied.

"Who?"

"Black Canary, Green Arrow, Flash, Cyborg, and Stargirl. And Batman and Chloe," J'onn ended.

"Uh, seven?" Conner said.

"Batman isn't a League member, and Chloe is somewhat retired from Watchtower duties, so she claims," Lex supplied, thinking over this turn of events. "What about Blue Beetle and Booster Gold?"

"They are currently dealing with some of Flash's Rogues Gallery in Central City," J'onn said.

"And Flash is here," Lex mused out loud. "He'll be distracted."

Lex raised his head and glanced up at J'onn. "Are you currently running them through the 'alien' scenario?" Lex asked.

"I have been minimally keeping them in the broader loop," J'onn said. "They have 'seen' glimpses of the 'enemy' coming in to land at the Central Park location. Many of them are headed there now."

"Can you bring them all into the larger scenario?" Lex asked.

"Unfortunately, no," J'onn said. "It would be too many of them to handle, all-at-once, under the circumstances."

"All right," Lex said easily, brushing some nonexistant dust off of the top of his helmet, then unclipping it from his belt and pulling it up to fiddle around with the insides of it. "I suppose the family plan is a wash, but that doesn't mean the afternoon has to be. Let's go with Tactical Simulation Scenario 12A."

"Huh?" Conner said, as Lex clicked his headset twice to switch to the other, more secure channel, and put his helmet back on.

"What would you specifically be referring t-- oh," J'onn blinked as Lex organized and balled up a shit-ton of information and mentally tossed it to the Martian. "I... see."

"I... find it vaguely disturbing how easily you have picked up on mind-to-mind communications," J'onn said slowly, looking thoughtful as he finished digesting what Lex had given him in-total.

Lex smiled and took it for the complement he believed it to be.

"I'm ready and up for it if you are," Lex said. "Hank, you up for this?" he said a little louder, readjusting the headset before dropping the visor back down on the helmet.

"Hell yeah!" he heard the former astronaut say. "12A, you bet yer ass. And I've already got a few eyes on Lara. She's doin' just fine."

Lex smiled. "Then release the 'hounds' and get them all in position," Lex supplied to the tune of an amused electronic chuckle.

He pulled out a comm-piece and a pair of goggles for J'onn and tossed it to him. "So you can stay in contact with Hank, since you can't telepathically 'hear' digitized sources?" He turned to Conner and gave him a 'come hither' gesture. "Helmet."

Conner pulled it off and handed it over, but he gave Lex a consternated look. "What's going on?" he asked. "What tactical simulation? What's that have to do with Mr. Henshaw?"

"J'onn had a talk a little while ago with Chloe about assessing the capabilities of the current active-duty League team," Lex supplied as he fiddled with the innards of Conner's helmet to turn on that particular electronic array. "Turn your earpiece to frequency twelve-point-four-two, seventh crypto-cipher-rotation, would you?"

Conner frowned and did as he was told.

"J'onn shared the conversation with me. Apparently they both think that it needs to be done, but were at a loss of how to do it successfully, as most of the team refuses to train as a team, and sometimes not even solo, so 'forcing' participation might not go over well." Lex smiled. "J'onn realized that subcontracting out might work better, given the circumstances, and sweet-talked me into helping as a consultant and assessor, for a favor or two."

"And they're actually _ok_ with this?" Conner said, sounding slightly shocked.

"J'onn, is my role as 'outside subcontractor and general instigator' _all right_?" he repeated with a smile, as if he hadn't asked the exact same thing earlier that week, hah!

"I see no problems with it," J'onn said.

Conner blinked, then frowned at him slightly. "Ok, so how exactly are we assessing them, if they already know who we are? --I mean, they won't fight me or J'onn seriously," _and they'd just gang up on you,_ went unspoken.

"You remember how I had you x-ray Clark's belt last week and we reproduced the circuitry?"

Conner nodded.

"And how we figured out how his holo-keyboard and the visual projection interface worked?"

Conner nodded again, a little more slowly, then... his eyes went wide.

"You didn't!" he said, scandalized.

"It isn't reverse-engineering if you're only figuring out the physics to pass along to your R&D heads-of-staff," Lex chuckled. "Besides, it's not _my_ fault Oliver's so damn unreasonable about not sharing cool tech," he chided.

"I-- What?" Conner stared at him. "Wait, I meant when Clark's belt went _missing_ three days ago and then magically reappeared again. --Oh shit, you mass-produced--??" Conner facepalmed.

"Mercy did it," Lex supplied. "Snagged it for me, I mean. It's not like he was using it at the time," he turned a baleful look on Conner, "And it works much better now. Didn't you say he said so?" He wasn't about to leave Clark with a subpar device, not when his own R&D staff had come up with a much better and more elegant design. It had only needed a few tweaks... and a few major part replacements... and...

Conner groaned.

"--Daaaaad!" he complained, and gave him the look he got when he thought Lex was avoiding something.

"What?" Oh right, the 'stealing' tech and mass-producing it. "Oh, _that_. It's just a few mini-rotorcraft drones that Hank's directing for me," Lex said reasonably. "Light-only, since we don't know how to do hard-light projections yet, obviously. The helmets," Lex hefted it and handed it back to Conner, "have, for lack of a better term, an inhibitor that cancels out the hologram being projected, to an extent, so _we_ can see through them, when no-one else can."

"...How many is _a few?_ " Conner asked, sounding suspicious.

"Oh, only about two hundred or so," Lex waved off.

" _Two hundred!?_ " Conner choked. "Don't you think that's kinda a bit much to throw at the League?" he asked, giving Lex a look. "And why do we need to be able to see through the holograms?" Conner asked as he adjusted his earpiece and helmet.

"Oh, most of those aren't for the League, they're for everyone else," Lex said.

"And how else are ya gonna see through the holograms from the inside?" Hank added with another chuckle. "Magic pixie dust?"

"From the _inside?_ " Conner frowned, then did a double-take as Mercy dropped down onto the roof, wearing a similar 'spacesuit'. "Wait -- everyone else???"

::J'onn?":: Lex asked as he flipped on his own computer interface and got to typing some last-minute instructions to Hank and the small IT crew helping him out. Verbalized speech was just taking too long, all-around.

He kept half a mental 'ear' on what J'onn was relaying to Conner as he made sure that Johnson and Maria had the satellite uplink locked down and secured, and he was pleased to hear from Joseph that the limb-tracking had been integrated into the code that morning, and should work just fine. Lex pulled out a red-chalk pencil and drew a few lines around his wrists, elbows, ankles, and knees, and waited for the first drones to reach them.

He smiled absently at Conner's exclamations as J'onn explained the details of what Lex had sent him earlier -- how the drone's holographic enemy projections would not be able to give solid 'hits' or resistance in return, but having a real person fighting inside one would do the trick just as nicely; how having some 'extra' drones ring the park to keep the public at bay was just a good idea all around, in case things got a little out of hand; how Lex had set things up with the non-League drone holograms, so that they would _look_ like game sprites from the 'wrong side', and how Lex had had his tech staff really set it up as a game that anyone could join in on at the outskirts, if they were willing.

"Seriously? Color-coded critical hit zones? Spinning QR codes for a defeat? _Prizes?_ " Conner asked incredulously.

"Don't forget the Interlac language guide I put out on the net last week, along with the billboards with hints and 'cheat codes'," Lex said. "There's more than one way to get points. Talking or tricking the enemy into turning on their comrades, or otherwise getting them to swtich sides and help fight, or other interesting strategies, are perfectly acceptable as well."

"Wait, are we gonna speak Interlac, too?" Conner asked. "Is this why you wanted me learning it?"

"Yes, we'll be speaking it as well, as it's as good a 'code' as any with the current group, since none of them speak it. It'll add to the realism, as well. And yes, it is, in part, why I wanted you to learn it," Lex said. "I think that it would be good for us to know the language, in general, given the marked increase in extra-terrestrial visitors Earth's had in the last few years, especially since we got our first Green Lantern. We can't expect every random alien we run across to know English ...even if I haven't figured out FTL travel, yet," he ended on a mutter.

"But... everybody else?" Conner asked.

"I've learned that things tend to go over better when people feel included," Lex said, not explaining that his own personal experience did a lot in that regard. "Watching League members battling from afar to save lives is one thing, watching them battle closer-up in a non-critical training scenario that no-one else can do anything about or have any say in is another. --Here, draw the lines like this," he demonstrated for Conner, before handing over the chalk-pencil and continuing. "I don't particularly like the current atmosphere, where people expect the Heroes to do everything for them, while they wait around to be saved. At the very least, that enforces a dangerous mindset that the Heroes are a 'them', not 'us', and that 'they' are responsible, while 'we' are not. It also necessarily means that there will be less new Heroes in the future, if Clark and his ilk keep up their mother-henning and down-talking," he muttered, a little pissed off by the whole thing. "And, quite frankly, I think more people _should_ get angry about being expected to sit on the sidelines. It's good for them, and it means we've all still got some fight left in us -- that we want to be better, _can_ be better, and to hell with what anyone else thinks we can or can't do!"

Conner was watching him carefully.

"Most people _want_ to get involved in things -- church, community, work, what-have-you -- but they just might not know _how_ they can help, or how they could be most useful. It's easier in the towns, because they're smaller," Lex said, thinking of Smallville. "There's more of a sense of community to build off of. People can't just live off alone and avoid interacting with people as easily in a town as they can in the city. People here don't have neighbors," Lex said, and he took a breath as he realized he was actually _complaining_.

"You want people... involved," Conner said.

"If I can get even _one_ more person thinking about helping others, how to plan for some new attack -- mundane or otherwise -- or any such thing, I will deem this project a success, and entirely worth the cost," Lex said flat-out. "I'd _like_ to be able to encourage such behavior further, if possible -- Interlac classes for people who want to learn, self-defense for those more physically-inclined, strategy and tactics for others who like the more brainy management issues," Lex said. "Frankly, I think I'm appealing to the geek types here, and Mercy agrees that they're probably the best ones to target, anyway -- they're the ones who tend to get more passionately-involved in these sorts of scenarios, even if prior to recent events everyone thought that all of that nonsense was less-real than they had ever thought possible." He thought of the groups they'd looked into especially -- the role-players, the Trek fans, the SCA groups. They got into it, and they used their heads about it, but while they might get _very_ involved in their own little worlds, they never got _lost_ in them. More often than not, Mercy had reported back that they had seemed _more_ down-to-earth and aware of the lines between reality and fantasy than most, not less.

"You want more... alien fighters?"

"I want more connected, more active, community-oriented, well-rounded people," Lex said firmly, tightening his gauntlet-gloves. He glanced up and tried out a few moves -- the drones had arrived and one had synched up with him. Mercy was trying one of hers as well, and J'onn was still messing about a bit with putting on the spacesuit Mercy had given him. Conner's was waiting patiently nearby. "If they really want to help out with fighting off the next invasion, fine -- more power to them, I'll be happy to help and give them my blessing if they want to dig in that deep and take on that much responsibility. But in many ways, that ship has sailed, and most of the professional and governmental bodies that should handle this secuity risk are working to do so already."

Lex sighed. "What I _really_ want now are people who are capable and willing to be firefighters, police, volunteer workers, community leaders, part-time teachers, on the neighborhood watch, what-have-you. People who actually give a damn and care about others. We've got the Heroes, now, as flawed as they are, like it or not," Lex grumbled. "What we _don't_ have yet is a universal support network to properly pick up the pieces long-term after all the fighting is done, or the social structures and emergency services to try and prevent such things from happening in the first place... or at least mitigate what gets through." He looked up at Conner. "Half of Flash's 'rogues' really just want the attention, you know, or just can't function in the current working climate and can't find any other way to live. Perpetual frustration does strange things to intelligent people sometimes."

"Is that why Flash usually spends most of his time talking with them, not fighting?" Conner asked.

Lex nodded tiredly. Better Bart than him -- _he'd_ certainly not have the patience to talk down a fool for his nonsense the twenty-fifth time. He'd probably shoot them in the face after the third, if not sooner.

Lex glanced over at J'onn and got a nod from him as he finished with the chalk. They were all nominally ready.

"But... why are _we_ gonna be in the middle of things?" Conner asked heistantly. "Couldn't you just use some of those robot bodies from STAR labs again?"

"We kind of killed their easy supply with the volcano and your sister, kid," Hank said. "They locked the rest down pretty tight, and dismantled the other humanoid ones." He sighed and added, "I can't do more than one at a time, anyway. Not unless I copied myself..." Hank added in a wobbly tone.

"--and that has ethical repercussions that none of us would like to deal with at this time," Lex ended for him. "Conner, you really don't have to do this with us," Lex said, guessing at what might be the root of his son's nervousness. "In principle, this is a training session, but in reality, this will be, in effect, a live-fire exercise."

"Ok," said Conner.

"Ok?" asked Lex.

"Ok. I'll do it."

Lex met and held his son's gaze. "Conner, this is serious. Make no mistake, if this goes _well_ , the League will be taking this seriously, and they won't be holding back any more than they would in a real fight. This won't be the same as a sparring session with some non-powered non-Hero type, and it won't be just a friendly sparring session with someone in the League," which, admittedly, Lex knew Conner would usually _kill_ for a chance at, which is why Lex was worried about whether his sone was going to be honest with him about his limitations. "Are you _sure_ you're up for this?"

Conner took a deep breath and lowered his gaze. He thought for awhile, then gulped, looked up, and nodded, resolute.

Lex blew out a breath.

"All right, then," Lex said, deciding to take the plunge and trust his son's judgment in the matter. "But if anything -- and I mean _anything_ \-- goes wrong, for anyone, we pull the plug. Understand?" He got nods all around.

Lex checked Conner's helmet once more, and quickly walked him through the sync-up process. Once his holo-projection was ready, Lex regulated his breathing, and tried to fight down the jittery feeling he was having. He wondered if it was normal to be more worried about the safety of one's superpowered son than one's own well-being.

"J'onn, you take Stargirl. Mercy, you want Cyborg, yes?" At her nod, he turned. "Conner, you'll need to take the Flash for us, but if you don't stay below two-hundred-mph then the projection can't keep up with you, so you'll need to outsmart him more than outspeed him. You up for it?"

Conner gave him a smile.

Lex nodded. "I'll take Black Canary and Green Arrow. I've dealt with them in close-quarters combat before." Lex took a breath. "Batman and Chloe should be keeping to the periphery as watchers, but keep your eyes open in case they decide to surprise us and join in."

He glanced around. "Any last questions?" At the silence, he said, "All right then. Hank's going to make these 'alien types' seem to teleport in, to handle the 'sudden appearance', since we can't spoof a large ship landing properly right now with what we've got; he has the sound and special effects already cued to go. We'll go in invisible and quiet. J'onn, would you do the honors of taking us over?"

And Lex felt the tension thrum through him as J'onn carefully lifted the four of them up and floated them towards the park.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex was on a major adrenaline high.

<Looks like they're taking us seriously!> Lex laughed in Interlac and he and the others dove to the ground.

<You think?!?> Conner yelped back.

J'onn, whose Prime-type holoprojection had something that looked like whips for hands, 'tossed out' a disguised ribbon with telekineticism, flipped it around Stargirl's staff, and pulled the whole mess back to him, at Courtney's startled and angry yell.

J'onn then proceeded to lay down cover fire using Stargirl's weapon against her own team, long enough for Lex to get in close to Dinah and Oliver and keep them too distracted for long-range attacks. Mercy similarly didn't waste time getting up close and personal with Victor to prevent the same, either.

Bart, on the other hand, found Conner.

<Where are the other two?> he queried Hank, who had the bird's-eye view of the situation.

<Batman is crouched off in the distance with binoculars. I don't see Chloe nearby,> Henshaw reported.

<How are the other groups? The civilian ones?> Lex asked, ducking under a bow and blocking a knife -- twisting, to make it a glancing blow across his forearm. It slid along his kevlar-layered ceramic-plated suit sleeve with a chitinous screech that was only made more realistic by the drone's speaker system.

Lex listened with half-an-ear to Hank's report as he dropped to a crouch and pulled a pair of escrima from the holders strapped to his back. He smirked to himself at the utter tastelessness of using older versions of Nightwing's weapons, retrieved from the aftermath of a Gotham battle or two, right in front of Batman's face, when the man couldn't even recognize them for what they were.

It made him want to laugh.

Instead, he settled for swinging, striking, and kicking at the two most annoying members of the League in front of him as they danced around him, and he, them.

Oddly, keeping close-quarters with them was turning out to be difficult -- they kept trying to move off, and he kept having to close in again. Lex also didn't seem to be having nearly as much difficulty in fighting them this time as he had before, years ago, when he'd been defending himself against their assault with guns -- and guns were his specialty.

Lex frowned as he tried to figure out what exactly was so wrong about this, what he was missing. He didn't have much time to think in the heat of the moment -- all reaction-reaction-reaction, block, dodge, weave, strike-strikenow-STRIKE -- but...

He hissed to himself as Dinah scored a solid hit to his ribs, and they both rushed him, and he decided playtime was over.

He dropped to one knee, charged the escrima, and slammed them forward into their stomachs.

...Shit, they hadn't even tried to dodge.

Lex panted low on the grass for the moment, dropping his arms, and looked down at the two Heroes splayed out in front of them, still-convulsing from the electrical shock.

...Well, that sucked. Lex felt jipped somehow.

 _Guess they weren't taking me seriously, after all,_ Lex mentally grumbled to himself, slowly rising to his feet. _They must have realized it was me and remembered the last time we fought, and thought... --well, no, you know what? Screw 'em._ Half the point had been to take these Heroes down a peg, to let them know that they needed more practice, weren't perfect, how easily they could be taken out if they weren't careful. They'd been too cocky as of late.

Lex heard a startled cry over the headset and glanced up to see Conner getting tossed across the grass by Bart like most people skipped stones across a lake.

Lex winced as Conner slammed into the pond and finally came to a halt.

<Conner?> he asked, worried.

<'m fine,> he heard in badly-accented Interlac, sounding woozy. <Kinda more invulnerable than he is. Just... sucks when he grabs me by the ankles and spins and...>

<Jump,> Lex ordered. <Straight up -- high -- NOW!>

Lex heard Conner's surprised yelp as he did so, barely dodging Bart's full-on run-across-water in the process.

<Stay up,> Lex said, thinking as fast as he could.

<Wh-what?> Conner gasped, still on the way up. <I-- I can't! I can't float!>

<Forget floating -- think!> Lex said patiently, watching Conner's ascent slow to a crawl, then pause for just a moment, then watched anxiously as he started to fall again.

<I-- _F-equals-m-a, sure, fine, whatever!_ > Conner said. <But I can't toss off the helmet or anything else, or I'll blow our cover!> he snapped, frustrated.

<Think!> Lex said urgently, watching Bart waiting under Conner with a not-so-nice grin as he dropped at increasing speed. <What else stays up in the air?!>

<I-- I don't-- birds!?gt; Conner said desperately. <Birds, butterflies, bees, planes-- shit!!!>

Lex heard when the lightbulb went on.

He grinned as Conner glanced upwards at the rotorcraft-drone, heard him laugh once over the comm. He watched as his son started pinwheeling his arms, faster and faster, and ended up sideways, backwards, still nearly hit the ground, heard Bart curse and raise his arms to cover his face as he got caught in the backwash.

He saw when Conner stabilized level and upright at a height with his arms a blur, looking like he had a pair of Kansas tornados in-miniature extending from his arms.

<Oh, oh yeah,> he heard his son say smugly. <It's on, now!!>

"Holy shit!" he heard Bart yell, over the peals of laughter that were translated into inhuman gloating shrieks through the drone's sound effects system.

Lex sniggered as he turned to survey the rest of the field, his son no longer having any issue with the speedster.

J'onn was more than holding his own with Stargirl -- effectively toying with her, sadly enough.

Mercy... seemed to be having some trouble with Cyborg, for some reason.

 _Damn,_ Lex thought, as he quickly disarmed and hogtied the Canary and the Arrow before the escrima's electric shock wore off. _I should have known better._ Mercy always loved a challenge, and Victor's fighting style was very strong against her own.

He also realized that she wasn't fighting him anything like full-out. ...Possibly because most of the moves she was most familiar and practiced with were takedown strikes to severely injure or kill, and not something one used on Heroes in an evaluation setting like this one. Shit.

Lex grimaced, rose to a crouch, and shoved off the ground at a ground-eating sprint.

He unslung the metal bat from his back as he came up behind Victor, and took a golf swing at Vic's cyborg knee.

Victor went head-over-heels backwards and he crashed into the ground with a hard thump and rattle of parts.

Lex skid to a near-immediate halt, boots digging into the turf. He reversed, took two steps back, gave a battle cry and brought his swing up-and-over, then straight down.

Victor, rattled, barely managed to choke as the end of the bat came down at him and--

Lex wrenched the motion to a stop about a centimeter above Vic's forehead, arms trembling with effort.

"K.O., tag out -- you're done, stay down," Lex informed him, then raised the bat and took a step away, before turning and addressing Mercy with a <If you want to play footsie with him, do it later!>

<Sorry, boss,> Mercy said, and hell, for a second there it looked like she might have been blushing.

"...What?" Cyborg croaked from the ground.

Lex ignored him and glanced around. Conner had managed to get himself to ground and tornado Bart off of his feet. Lex watched as Conner let Bart go, and then sped over to him as he fell and, with a hand over his chest, shoved him lightly into the ground and held him down. The speedster in red looked rattled.

J'onn walked over with an irate Stargirl slung over a shoulder, kicking and yelling with hands and feet tied up in ribbon.

_...All right, so where--_

"Ahem."

Lex whirled and came face-to-face with the Batman, who had been _right fucking behind him **what the hell** when had **that** happened?_. He brought his escrima up reflexively and--

\--Batman clicked a button on his wrist--

\--and all the drones in the park seemed to lose power and fell out of the sky.

Lex flinched as his own slammed into the ground by his feet, then he glanced back up at Batman and glared.

<How the hell did he hack our control line?> he spat out.

<Shit,> Hank said in his ear. <Just-- just gimmie a minute-- Johnson's freaking out, uh, Maria says they lost the satellite feed in the area. _Just_ that area. Shit. Beth might be able to get a workaround-- >

<We come in peace, why don't you?> Batman said in flawless Interlac.

Well, fuck.

<You puny humans serve no purpose here. You do not deserve your planet -- we claim it as our own!> Lex replied back, twitching.

<And so you shame your princess to serve your queen?> Batman replied cooly.

 _Oh goddamnit you son of a bitch!_ Lex straightened and glared lasers at the man.

<...It's your call,> he heard Henshaw say over the line, with an odd static-y sound that came off as a shrug.

<Yes, damnit, take it all down,> Lex said, pissed off. The flickering, all-wrong holoprojections shut off completely. "But for the record," Lex grated out, as he flipped up his helmet visor and poked Batman in the chest-protector, "That is _supposed_ to be the stop-win phrase for group **twelve** , _not_ you idi--"

Pain exploded across his back.

"Ngff. Ow," Lex said as his head swam, and he realized that the green stuff in his field of view was field-stuff. Grass.

Oh, but fuck his back hurt.

He heard yelling off behind him, Conner and Chloe, it seemed like.

"Bitch!" he heard Mercy growl close-up.

"Brainwashed lunatic! Nearly took my hand off!" Chloe yelled.

" _Don't_ shoot my _father!_ " Conner yelled hysterically, which sounded suddenly a lot closer at the end there.

"'m fine," Lex groaned, levering himself up and over onto his back, and nearly bit his tongue on the wince. "Kevlar is awesome," he hissed out. "Spine shots are still a bi-i- bad. Very bad," he censored himself. He made a mental note to add more padding to the design, somehow, anyhow, _post-haste_ , because the current force-distribution? _Really_ wasn't enough -- especially at the lower back and the neck. He couldn't feel his feet at the moment, and he was still seeing stars.

He struggled somewhat back to an upright seated position next to a kneeling, worried-looking Conner.

Then he realized Chloe was retrieving her gun from the ground and he was now facing her way with his visor up.

He flipped his visor down.

Mercy had her gun out and up, and was looking all growl-y over at Chloe, well and truly pissed off.

Lex was wondering what the hell was going on.

"Luthor, you son of a bitch! You're not going to get away with this!!" Chloe yelled.

...And now Lex was officially even more confused than ever. "What?" he said.

"If you think that you can use some stupid game as a cover to take out the League, you've got another thing coming, you--!"

Lex blanked out for a moment.

"I--" He stopped, then frowned. "Aren't official League-business meetings every third Sunday each month?" he asked.

"How did you know that?!" Bart proclaimed, staggering upright.

Lex glanced over at him with a 'duh' look, because, honestly, was it supposed to have been a secret of some sort?

"Not this month," Chloe spat out at him. "We decided to change it up to two Sundays every--" she clamped down on the rest, and Lex had to wonder if that was a calculated ploy, or if she'd really been so upset that she'd let slip.

Not that it mattered, because she could easily work something else out and oh fuck, that wasn't the point--

Lex nearly turned and opened his mouth to ask J'onn, 'You didn't tell them?' before he froze and put on his business face.

He had asked J'onn to bring up Lex's willing participation in their assessment of the League's capabilities at the next League meeting.

J'onn had agreed to do so.

They hadn't had their next League meeting yet.

When Lex had asked J'onn on Monday -- and again this afternoon at Conner's worry -- if his role as outside subcontractor and general instigator was all right, J'onn had said that it was ok _with him_.

Oh. Fuck.

Lex broke out into a cold sweat.

_J'onn set me up._

And he'd walked right into it.

Lex hadn't been trying to kill or otherwise attack the League outright. Not really. It was, in essence, supposed to be a game. ...One that he had enjoyed way more than he should have, having free reign to terrorize the League -- within reason -- but he had been _asked_ to _beat down the League_ , oh please, oh please, oh please! --with no consequences. And he had jumped at the chance.

But all Lex had? Was his own word, and the word of his employees. Which was worth crap with these people.

J'onn had set him up. And he'd walked right into it like a fool.

And Conner -- oh god, Conner. Lex could get him off, should be able to, yes. The League thought Conner was gullible, they'd believe that Lex had tricked Conner into believing him, so yes, that would work, Conner would be ok--

\--But by god, there was no way Lex was going to go down like this without a fight. He felt the rage grow inside him, and he struggled not to let it out... just yet. But he would. And they would _deserve_ it. Mercy would back him, and they would take as many of these hypocritical, lying bastards down with them as they could when they--

And then Lex forgot how to breathe.

"...What did you say?" Chloe asked aghast.

Lex turned his head slowly, up to J'onn.

"I said, I am sorry. I believe I misunderstood what you meant when you said you wanted a training and evaluatory mission that no-one knew about," J'onn repeated.

Lex sucked in a breath.

And then let out a shaky laugh.

"Ah, J'onn..." he started, then bit his lip and shook his head. His looked down and saw his hands were shaking from the adrenaline rush that now had no place to go, and he pressed his palms flat against the ground. "That's not-- generally how it--" He let out another shaky laugh. "I'm sorry as well. I forget that as human as you seem, you are not. I should have made sure that everything was absolutely clear... to all parties involved." _See, this is what happens when you trust others to do your talking for you,_ he told himself.

He cleared his throat, then said. "It's one thing to have a evaluatory mission and not know what it's going to be beforehand. It's an entirely different manner to have a mission and not know whether it's real or not going into it. The former is... acceptable. The latter? Is insane."

Lex was too focused on J'onn to see anyone else's reactions to that statement, but Hank was listening and watching, and he still had a few drones on the edges of the park that were functional. So when he caught that video feed, he saved himself a copy in case he thought he might ever need it later.

"If a League member gets the call for a mission, and they don't know whether it is real..." Lex shook his head. "They already tend to balance whether they think they're really needed for a mission they're being called for, against what they're dealing with that's happening in their own backyards, but if they also start to second-guess whether the call is a false alarm or not?" Lex shook his head. "It'd be a disaster. I've seen some of those transcripts. Watchtower has a hard enough time getting people to help out as it is."

"You've read _what?_ " Chloe screeched.

Lex grinned up at her. "Oh, sorry, did I forget to mention? Your operational security sucks, and your firewalls are pathetic."

Chloe looked like she was going to shoot him again.

"Is that how you got the designs for the holoprojectors?" Oliver asked darkly, rubbing at his wrists, and like hell Lex was going to be sitting talking while Oliver towered over him -- he forced himself to his feet despite the pain. --And then casually teetered to the side in the process, to get Batman away from his back. The man was _deranged._ Conner quickly stood up with him, not quite hovering. Lex glanced over, and saw Victor still working at untying Dinah. He mentally rolled his eyes -- Vic would have an easier time of it if she'd just stay still and stop screeching about it like a harpy.

"No," Lex said. "I didn't just download the blueprints for those. Computer B&E was getting boring, so I decided on a different, more challenging acquisition route," he said casually.

He felt Conner shift guiltily beside him.

"You stole our tech," Oliver said, with Chloe glaring beside him.

"You're one to talk!" Lex threw back at him, and Mercy snorted in agreement -- that shit just didn't fly.

"I think that perhaps I should have further discussion with Batman and Chloe about this?" J'onn put forward.

"Oh yes, we _definitely_ need to talk about this," Chloe said heatedly, sending a glare Lex's way, before force-marching J'onn off to the fringes of the group.

Batman didn't move immediatly -- in fact, was as still as a statue. Lex glanced up at him and said, "Problem?"

"Those are not yours, Luthor," Wayne rumbled down at him.

Lex shivered despite himself. "They're not yours, either. Frankly, I think Nightwing should take better care of her things. She loses them so easily, just throwing them away..."

When Batman snatched them out of Lex's grasp, leaving his hands stinging, Lex didn't protest. He did throw a not-horribly-sarcastic "You're welcome!" at Wayne's back as he stalked off, though, because the man _ought_ to be thanking him for having his people grab them before the street punks had, and had realized what they'd had.

 _Lex_ certainly had -- he'd reverse-engineered the battery power-cell tech in them to make the power units for the rotorcraft-drones he'd been using today.

"Holy crap, man," Bart said, edging up on Conner's side. "How the hell did you come up with that tornado thing?" He looked at him like one man wanting to swap trade secrets with another of the initiated.

"I dunno," Conner said. "I sort of got freaked into thinking it up by my dad, I guess. --Though I don't know why he didn't just tell me," he ended, glancing sideways at Lex, having obviously realized awhile ago that Lex had thought of it first before he had.

"Would you rather I just gave you an answer, or would you like to solve it yourself?" Lex asked him. "Which do you enjoy more?"

Conner opened his mouth to protest, then stopped and looked thoughtful.

" _An_ answer?" Conner asked cagily.

Lex smiled at him.

Conner blew out a breath and then blushed.

"Soooo... are you gonna feed us?" Bart asked snarkily. "'Cause I'm hungry, and when we have League get-togethers, whoever called it usually takes care of food, and I'm hungry. Seriously. Starving. Could eat you out of house and home," he said, grinning.

Lex gave him a long look.

"Would you trust me not to lace anything I give you with sleeping agents and GPS trackers?" Lex asked him.

Bart stared at him for awhile.

"I think I'm gonna go bug Chloe about food, now," he said.

"You do that," Lex replied.

Bart got.

Lex sighed and gave Conner an amused look. <So, Hank, what's the final status on the civilian game?> he asked over the comm unit -- which was still working, so whatever the Bat had done to the drones must have been an actual honest-to-god hack, not an EMP of some sort.

<Everybody did pretty damn well, from what your guys are saying,> Henshaw said, and supplied the stats.

<Hm, _much_ better response-times and mobilization than expected, on all fronts, > Lex mused. <;Anyone have any ideas about why that is?>

<Oh, uh, well, there was this thing where somebody decided to combine twitter feeds for info updates, an automated pin-drop for locations on Google Maps for updates on where the 'alien opponents' were, and a Reddit page to keep track of it all.>

Lex blinked. <They did all that in... how long?> he asked, because he hadn't made the details clear at all to what was gong to happen until it was in-progress. All the LexCorp 'underground media' had given was a general timeframe over which the 'game event' might start, a long list of _possible_ places to be included in the action, and the fact that what was going to happen was going to be sponsored by the company. They'd set up some specific locations and goodies for particular groups that had bugged them to death for their own sub-plots and sub-games, but they'd only done that for those that had gotten through the vast majority of the language or cipher 'codes' that had been scattered about the city or online.

<Not long,> Hank said, but there was an odd edge to his electronic voice.

<Was there someone in particular in charge?> Lex asked, curious. <Do we have a name?>

<Uh, yes.>

Lex raised an eyebrow, and glanced at Conner, who looked just as curious as Lex was. <Well?> he asked.

<Um, yeah. So, Superman decided to help out a bit...> Hank started.

And Lex started cursing loud, long, and creative. In ancient Greek. Because he knew Conner didn't know that language, so he could get away with doing so with impugnity.

_Messing up my scenarios! Why, why, **why** does he **always** have to screw up my plans?!?_

"DADDY!" he heard from behind him.

"erg-- oof!" Lex said, nearly bowled over from behind as he was grabbed around the neck by his youngest. " _Lara,_ " he sighed out, the rage draining out of him as he reached around to tug her around to his chest. She giggled and acquiesced. "Good to see you, sweetheart," he told her lovingly. "But I've got a bone to pick with you," Lex ended in a significantly darker tone, glaring at Superman.

"What?" Clark asked.

"You messed up my scenarios!" Lex said, taking off his helmet and clipping it to his belt at his side. He shifted Lara a little higher and she cuddled in close. "They were _supposed_ to be for everybody _else!_ "

"So?"

Argh! " _You said you didn't want to get involved!_ "

"I changed my mind," Clark said loftily.

<He helped our side, too,> Hank added tentatively, and that was the last straw.

"s-s-s-s-s-s-s! _You!!!_ " Lex made clutching motions at him with his free hand, because he damn well would have strangled the Kryptonian -- _why_ was he _always_ getting into _everything_ in _all_ the _wrong_ ways and _why, just why?!? why?!?!?!?_ \-- except that he had an armful of Lara and Lane was standing _right next to him_. Holding a crowbar. Wait. What the--

"Yeah, well, _I_ have a bone to pick with _you_ Luthor!" Lois demanded, waggling the crowbar at him.

"Uh," said Lex intelligently, trying not to go cross-eyed at the cast-iron tip wiggling about an inch away from his nose.

"Those things were _horrible!_ " she complained, dropping her hand full of weaponry to her hip and glaring at him. "One good solid hit, and they just fell apart!"

"One good-- what?" Lex said. "They were supposed to take three, at least!" he frowned at her.

"Well, then whoever made them _lied_ to you and skimped on the ruggedized armor," Lois proclaimed. "Those things were just _pathetic_. And those rotoblades? Just snapped like twigs!" she said, snapping her fingers to demonstate.

 _Wait, what? --Oh for--! That--!_ "You weren't supposed to hit the _drones!_ " Lex said, outraged.

"What are you talking about, Luthor?" Lois said. " _Everybody_ knows you go for the headshot, and when you swing right through the head-visual-thing on the upswing--"

"Rrgh." Lex facepalmed. Damned army brats, breaking his shit.

"That is _not_ how you're supposed to-- ugh, _never mind,_ " he ended, thoroughly disgusted with the woman. " _Fine_ \-- I'll make you something less breakable to follow you around to get whacked out of the air -- will that make you happy?!?"

"Yes," Lois said primly, and Lex stifled another groan.

To say he was thrilled to watch her wander her way over to where her cousin was still chatting up the Martian and the Bat would have been a _vast_ understatement.

"So, I don't suppose I can get my things back?" Clark asked expectantly, rocking back and forth on his heels.

Lex blinked at him, then glanced down at Lara, who was still apparently holding onto Clark's communicator and belt.

"Benches are safe zones!" Lara declared. "Like daddy!"

"Ah..." Lex said, glancing up at Clark. "Good to know."

Lex held out a hand, and said, "If you please?" and Lara giggled and handed over the two items to him.

"Trade you for them," Clark said a little smugly, as he held out a small plastic bag, with what looked like the remnants of--

"My cape's lined with lead," Clark explained, and Lex realized that meant he'd probably used the fabric to encircle the bracelet and then pull it off, once the effects of the blue-K were no longer working on him. "I guess their suits are lined with it, too?"

Hm. Clark must have gotten close enough to her to notice she didn't just fall out of the air at the exposure. "No," he said, as he passed Clark's things back to him. "But close. Kevlar's naturally somewhat radiation-resistant, and I added a few other types of polyethylene to the mix to make it more so, along with a little bit of silicon and tungsten to the ceramic force-plates."

Lex blinked as Clark offered the broken bracelet pieces to him. "Ah, you can keep that if you-- wish..." he ended brokenly as Clark forcibly placed it in his hand and wrapped his finers around it. Lex looked at it, then up at Clark, then pocketed it, giving the alien an odd look.

"Mm," Lara complained quietly.

"Problem?" Lex asked her, frowning slightly and shifting her in his arms.

"Tired," she said, then yawned.

Lex blinked then smiled and said, "Ah, well, you did quite a lot today, didn't you?" as he removed her helmet and hung it off of her own belt.

"Mm?" Lara blinked up at him, stretching a little.

"You did very well," Lex said, giving her a quick smootch to her brow.

Lara gave him a happy sigh in return and then tilted her head back, took a deep breath and relaxed.

Lex suddenly realized when he'd last seen this behavior.

"Conner, take off your helmet and unzip-off the top of your suit, would you?" he murmured with a glance at his eldest, who was also beginning to droop. He tugged at Lara's zipper, and then maneuvered her arms out of the top of her bodysuit one at a time, letting it hang loose down from her waist.

Lara blinked and seemed to wake up a little bit. She blinked her eyes open and seemed to brighten a little -- still a bit tired, but not so horribly sleepy and de-energized.

"I forgot about the sunlight," Lex murmured, glancing over at Clark with a slight frown. _I'd wondered why he didn't just wear full radiation-proof gear all the time. ...I suppose now I know._

Clark gave him a quirky half-smile, while Conner shucked off the top, then yawned and stretched and blinked in surprise as he suddenly felt the difference the sunlight was making.

"So, Conner, would you like to stay over and hang out with Lex until dinner tonight, or come back to the apartment?"

Conner blinked at Clark, and glanced between him and Lex.

"It's not a trick question, Conner," Clark laughed softly.

"Um, I'll probably just end up falling asleep, actually," Conner admitted. "I _am_ kinda wiped, too."

"Connerrrrrr," Lara begged, making the bigeyes.

"Um. ...I guess wherever Lara is gonna be?" Conner said hopefully.

"Ok. --Lex?" Clark asked him.

Lex blinked. "Of course. Yes. Penthouse fine?" he asked, glancing between the two of them.

He garnered two nods from two Super-s.

Huh. This was new. Clark didn't usually offer Lex up to Conner like it was a choice--

"And as for dinner itself..." Clark started.

"--Your place," Lois interrupted, as she walked back over. "Pizza and chinese takeout, we'll order in. None of that foofy stuff tonight," she brazenly declared, coming to a stop at Clark's shoulder and wrapping a proprietary arm around his waist.

"My place?" Lex queried, feeling a little off-put.

"Well, we need to talk," Clark said, and oh, Lex didn't like the sound of that.

\--or the way Clark was looking at Lara. Lex clutched her a little closer to his chest.

"It's not like that, Lex," Clark said softly. "Just... relax, ok? Nothing bad."

Lex took a breath and glanced over at Lois, who didn't look in the least like she wanted a new addition to her household, so yes. They weren't thinking about trying to take her away from him, right? It couldn't be that bad... right?

He nodded slowly.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	4. Interlude: The Martian, The Bat, and the Tower

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes: Occurs in parallel with the end of Chapter 3. (After [Plan O](http://archiveofourown.org/works/490149/chapters/862842), before Plans P and Q; obliquely references Plan J, K, L, and O).

~*~*~*~*~*~

"What the _hell_ did you think you were doing, J'onn?!" Chloe rounded on him. "And don't give me that 'I'm an alien' bullshit -- I know better than to fall for that."

J'onn sighed. "I don't suppose it might seem telling that even Lex thinks that conducting 'surprise' training and evaluatory missions that no-one is told the truth about, or not until well after they have concluded, is a bad idea?"

"Considering that Luthor can't seem to find the hypocrisy between him saying _that_ , and him turning right around and not telling Clark the truth about his little fantasy Lara-was-created-for-my-island-takeover-by-a-madman plans beforehand? _NO,_ " she said flatly. She took a deep breath and continued hotly, "And if you disagreed so strongly, you could have just said something instead of fucking blowing things to hell and pulling _Luthor_ of all people into it! Now the option is _completely_ off the table, with the way this went down!" she hissed at him, throwing her hands up in the air.

When J'onn stood there stoically, Chloe blinked, then her eyes went wide and she looked absolutely enraged. "--And you _knew_ that!" she accused him. "You did it _deliberately_ this way--!"

"Yes. I did." J'onn admitted freely. "Mainly because I _did_ 'disagree so strongly', and you weren't listening to me, Queen." He looked down his nose at her. "It might help you to remember that I am not _your_ Knight," he ended evenly.

Chloe sucked in a breath and straightened.

"Does Luthor consider you an ally?" Batman asked J'onn, coming up from behind him.

J'onn turned and shifted to make their meeting more of a triangle than a straight line. "Yes, I believe he does. Why?"

"Can you explain his reaction when Chloe made her accusations, both before and after you spoke for him?"

J'onn sighed. "Unfortunately, yes. Yes, I can."

"Telepaths," Chloe muttered.

"He gave me permission to read his surface-level thoughts," J'onn said, managing his frustration and anger as he had become accustomed to having to do at her constant belittling of his code of conduct -- which she believed nonexistent, which was really half the problem.

"Are you still doing so?" Batman asked.

"He hasn't asked me to stop," J'onn said. "So, yes."

Chloe snorted.

"But if he asks me to stop, I will," J'onn said.

"You think he won't ask?" Batman said.

"He seems to have... unusual blind spots in his thinking at times," J'onn said. "It may not occur to him to ask for some time, if ever. The thought might actually require prompting."

"And you would want Luthor's thoughts swimming around in your brain twenty-four-seven _why?_ " Chloe snarked with no small disgust.

"It helps me to understand him better. He is very different than I have heard him to be, from any of you," J'onn said coldly and, quite frankly, he was more than a little pissed off about that.

"No-one has been correct about him?" Batman said with no small disbelief.

"You and Clark have the closest understanding to him of anyone, it seems," J'onn replied. "From what I have observed thus far, Clark understands _him_ but not his motivations. Clark is also very confused and uncertain as to how to treat Lex for his previous actions. Clark is concerned that he may be wrong about him, again and still, and is not certain whether he can risk trusting Lex in any significant manner. I believe this is why Clark tends to respond with anger and frustration -- as a shield against his own fear of future hurt." J'onn sighed. Sometimes, he felt, it would be so much easier if humans had telepathy and could be as completely open as Martians could... or rather, had used to be.

"While I better understand Lex's motivations, but not him," Batman ended.

"You lack the background knowledge that Clark has gained over years of relations with him," J'onn confirmed.

"And we care about this why?" Chloe said, frustrated, crossing her arms.

"We care because Luthor is dangerous," Batman said.

"Every League member is dangerous," J'onn added as a clarification, lest Chloe mistake Batman's words.

"No, they aren't! --and Luthor is _not_ joining the League!" Chloe said.

"Yes, they are," Batman said. "Every one of you is -- and yes, that includes you, Chloe," he rumbled, "Those gunshots weren't child's play -- anyone would be injured by those hits, even through body armor, at the very least." He looked down at her with dismay. "And he should join the League."

"He won't," J'onn cut in. "He has given his flat-out refusal at even the mention of the concept several times whenever I have attempted to discuss it with him."

"...This will make things more difficult," Batman said lowly.

"Yes," J'onn sighed.

Chloe looked between the two of them aghast. "You two do remember who we're talking about, right? Lex Luthor? Spawn of Satan? Why in the hell are you even _considering_ trying to get him to join? Nobody likes him, nobody wants him, and that doesn't even **begin** to touch upon what he's _done_ \--"

"You conscripted Tess," Batman said, effectively closing the discussion.

...except Chloe certainly didn't see it that way. "That was different!"

"How?" Batman asked her.

"For one thing, she--"

"--was a sociopath, who did far worse and killed and terrorized far more people than Lex ever did, on an even shorter timescale, and with next to no remorse for her actions, other than frustration at being caught out," J'onn interrupted her. "This is not up for discussion. I've seen into both her mind and Lionel's, and while I've not delved so deeply into Lex's thoughts as of yet, I can already say with the utmost certainty that of the three of them, he is by far the best _person_ of them all."

"No, he isn't!" Chloe argued. "At least Tess was trying. But Lex... --He gave up. Clark knows it, I know it. Everybody knows it! He _isn't_ a good person, he _didn't_ just _give in_ to that darkness that he was always telling Clark about -- he _embraced_ it -- and if you haven't seen it yet, it's because he's hiding it from you farther down than you've looked," Chloe said with absolute and utter certainty, crossing her arms.

"He isn't segmented off or cold like Lutessa, Chloe," J'onn said, none-too-patiently. "If anything, I am sorely concerned at how tangled up everything inside of him is. He hasn't given up, or he wouldn't be trying so hard with Clark, and he isn't hiding; he couldn't hide from me if he tried," J'onn said with a long frustrated breath out. "Frankly, I find it insulting that you think so little of my abilities and mental training."

"Stop," Batman commanded, and Chloe cut back her next retort. "This isn't helping." He turned to Chloe. "Watchtower, like it or not, past and past history or not, Lex Luthor is a dangerous man. He can either be an ally or an enemy. If we force him to remain an outcast and outsider, we _will_ turn him into an enemy, whether he wants to be or not, whether we are intending that or not." He looked at her grimly. "Considering how much he already knows about all of us, it would be incredibly stupid to give him a reason to decide to fight against us or bring us down when he may not have the will or inclination otherwise." He looked to J'onn.

"He doesn't," J'onn confirmed. "Not at present. Not unless he feels an immediate threat."

"And his reaction earlier?" Batman said, getting back to point.

J'onn felt uncomfortable. "He believed himself betrayed. That I had set him up somehow, in having him attack the League without their... permission, when he thought I had obtained it, and he feared for a moment that I would lie about what we had discussed earlier and claim I knew nothing prior."

Batman's eyes narrowed. "I thought you agreed that he considers you an ally."

"He does," J'onn said quietly.

"Typical," Chloe muttered. "...What? That's what he expects, because that's what he does!"

J'onn shook his head. "He didn't consider me an ally when he thought that I was betraying him."

"That was when he had his ill reaction," Batman mused, almost a question, and J'onn nodded. "Why did he not attempt to defend himself to Chloe?" Batman said slowly.

"He believed that it would make no difference and that no-one would believe him; certainly not her," J'onn said sourly, feeling vaguely ill at the memory of how quickly and how darkly Lex's thoughts had turned. "He was not planning on lashing out with words..." J'onn could not omit the rest in good conscience. "But he felt himself backed into a corner. He would have reacted badly to any further provocation, had I not shared the truth of my involvement."

"Why would he think we would not have been able determine what truly went on, even if you had denied such a thing?" Batman said coldly.

"Why would _any_ of us _ever_ believe _Luthor_ over one of our own?" Chloe said, sounding scandalized.

Batman turned and gave her a long stare.

"Please do not take his reaction personally; at no point did your detective skills cross his mind," J'onn put forth.

"--Hey, guys?" Impulse said, running up to them for a moment. His grin lost a good bit of its shine as he glanced between them all and tensed.

Chloe kept her eyes on Batman. "Bart, can you go help out Ollie and the others?" she asked.

Bart seemed to decide that the better part of valor was to leave them alone for awhile.

"Yeah, okay," Impulse said, sounding a little put out for a second, before he sped away again.

"...How many of the League feel this way about Luthor?" Batman asked J'onn finally, continuing to give Chloe a long, expressionless stare.

"All of them," J'onn said. "With perhaps the exception of Clark, who would second-guess such thoughts at some point, and Lois, who would find out differently in the course of whatever investigation she would go through in attempting to 'nail him to the wall'."

"...I think I begin to see the problem," he told J'onn.

"Yes," J'onn agreed.

"Wayne--" Chloe began.

"You cannot let your personal feelings and past history cloud your judgment, Watchtower," Batman gravelly reminded her, thoroughly unamused. "I know I taught you better than that, when you came to me in Gotham looking for training and succor when the VRA was at their worst."

"I'm not--!"

"You are. I've seen it before," Batman informed her, and she glared at him, but she was the one who broke gaze first, looking down and away guiltily. "I don't know what action or inaction of his has prompted this personal vendetta you have against him," Batman continued, "and at this time I don't particularly care. Again, this is not the point. The point is to watch and neutralize him effectively, so that he is no longer a threat in the interim," Batman said. "We can discuss justice later."

"Well, that's an easy one," Lois said as she inserted herself into the conversation, walking over. "Just ask his little kid-daughter to bat her eyes at him and ask him not to do stupid shit anymore, and he won't," she ended with a smirk.

Chloe stared at her.

"What? Have you not seen him with her? Just look at 'em!" she declared, pointing a thumb at them over her shoulder. "I swear to god, he's worse with Lara than _Cat_ is over her own son -- and that's _really_ saying something, _believe me_ ," Lois groaned, rolling her eyes.

Batman and Chloe exchanged glances. J'onn stood there stoically.

"Or, y'know, just bug Clark into getting within a half-mile of him, and whatever plans he had will crash and burn. I swear, the only stuff he does that halfway works out these days is stuff when Clark's not around. --I mean, did you _hear_ about the vampire thing?" she grinned. "--Just don't go calling Clark in from our apartment at three in the morning, or I might have to kill someone," she added matter-of-factly.

"...Who are you, and what did you do with my cousin?" Chloe asked weakly.

"Huh?" said Lois, blinking at her.

"Whatever happened to hating Luthor! And... and wanting to nail him for killing Lionel?!" Chloe said.

"We're trying to nail him for Lionel? That's what this little pow-wow is about? I thought there was no evidence left?" Lois said, sounding confused.

"No, we're talking about having him join the League," Chloe said.

There was a pause.

Lois scrunched up her face. "Seriously?" she asked, starting to smile.

Then she started to grin, and then laugh hilariously.

Chloe stood there with her hands on her hips, glaring at her in annoyance.

"--Oh, oh man," Lois said, bent over and wiping the tears out of her eyes. "That's-- that's just-- that's... wait..." Lois said, as she finally calmed down. "... _Seriously?_ "

"Yes," said Chloe.

" **Seriously**."

"Yes," said Chloe.

Lois stared at them. "...Holy fucking crap, you guys are serious," Lois said flatly.

"Yes," said Chloe.

Lois stared at them some more.

"That is the stupidest idea I have ever heard," Lois declared.

" _Thank_ you!" said Chloe, throwing her hands up.

"Whose idea was this?" Lois asked, and then she scrunched up her face again. "Wait, it wasn't Luthor, was it? Is he... trying to pull a Tess, or something?" she asked, like she was having a hard time wrapping her head around the concept.

"No," said Chloe. "Or at least, he'd better not be. It was _their_ idea," Chloe said, pointing to the two males of the group.

"Yeah, no, that's bullshit," Lois told them. "Won't work. The League hates him, and Clark's pretty sure the feeling's mutual. You wouldn't last the week. Just let Clark keep doing his thing," she ended.

"...What thing?" Batman, J'onn, and Chloe asked her, in various tones, then glanced among each other.

"Uh, the thing where he's been having Lex do some of his 'friendship plan' things with other League members, and they sort-of end up friends over it?" Lois said, frowning at them. "Clark's only been taking the ones that sound kind of dangerous and might need someone apologizing for Lex for after," she ended, rolling her eyes again.

J'onn blinked at her, then asked, "So, last month with the odd scavenger hunt..."

Lois got a small smile. "What, you didn't pick up on that?" She bit her lip to stifle what looked like laughter and shifted from side to side. "Would you have ever considered talking with Lex on your own, or helping out with this mess, if that hadn't happened?"

J'onn thought for awhile on it.

"No, I don't believe I would have," he said, finally.

"Yeah, neither would AC and Mera, but the whole weird terrorist-thing that Clark kind of passed off to them has him kind of friends with them now," Lois said with a smirk. "Mera really enjoys teasing him, from what I hear."

"...I can't believe you're actually ok with him, now," Chloe said, sounding faint.

"Say, what? --No," Lois objected. "Look -- give me something solid on him, that I can research and then use to nail him and have him put away? And I'll do it in a heartbeat. But I don't have anything on him, and he's really not doing anything lately other than being really annoying and freaking out Clark," she said. "I mean, sure, I kind of want to throttle him for doing stupid shit like jumping my fiance for his DNA and making himself another kid without even asking Clark about it at all, but that technically doesn't count as rape, and Lex obviously really loves his kid, so..." Lois shrugged and looked a little squeamish.

"I don't know, it's like... he's got good intentions?" Lois continued, thinking out loud. "But somehow he's _completely_ socially inept, and you just want to punch him in the face for being such an idiot sometimes, except it's like he doesn't really mean it. --Though I honestly don't know how he manages to survive, let alone CEO LexCorp, when he's just _that bad_ at dealing with people."

Lois shook her head. "I mean, I don't _like_ him, but it's kind of hard to _hate_ him when he's _that_ clueless about shit. And it's like he's so bad at it that there's no way he could be faking it, either," Lois sighed. "I _swear_ , if I find out that the only reason that Luthor did half the stupid shit he's done over the years is because somebody wasn't looking over his shoulder to tell him 'no, that's a bad thing, don't do that!' and smack him upside the head, because he just doesn't know any better himself and would stop if he knew otherwise? Then I'm gonna be _really_ pissed off," she threatened.

J'onn and Batman exchanged a long glance.

"Well, _I_ wouldn't be at all surprised," Oliver interjected, as he came up behind Chloe and draped his arms over her shoulders, leaning on his wife with a quiet, happy sigh at having successfully 'trapped' her for the moment. "I've been telling people he's an idiot for years, but does anybody listen to me? --Ow," he said good-naturedly as Chloe elbowed him, and he gave up and shifted the rest of his weight back onto his own two feet.

"And on that note..." Chloe said, rolling her eyes at her husband's antics, but smiling slightly nonetheless.

"Yeah, yeah, a reporter's work is never done," Lois waved a hand back at them with a half-smile, then turned to look back at Clark. "Just look at that motley Luthor crew that's got him surrounded out on the green," she said, tongue-in-cheek. She wiped her hands against each other in midair, ready to dig in and get her hands dirty. "Welp, guess I'd better get to it. Smallvilles to rescue, and Luthors to thwart, as usual!" Lois grinned.

"Perhaps we should reconvene at the Watchtower and discuss the events of the afternoon, and everyone's performance, there," J'onn put out there.

"We might as well," Chloe sighed, obviously not wanting to let the 'training exercise' go to waste, no matter who had set it up.

"Count me and Clark out; we've got plans for tonight, I think. --Or we will if I have anything to say about it," Lois told them. "You and Ollie'll have to have all the fun without us."

Chloe rolled her eyes again as Oliver let out a long groan.

"Great..." Oliver said under his breath, because he really wasn't looking forward to having his 'performance' picked apart by both Chloe _and_ Batman, with J'onn looking on.

"Hey, I untied Stargirl, and Canary's free," Bart said, in high cheer again as he zipped back up to them and skid to a stop. "Is there anything else that needs doing?"

"Debriefing," Oliver said a bit sourly.

"Oh, great!" Bart said enthusiastically. "Sooooo... --there's gonna be food, right?"

Lois grinned, Chloe bit her lip and looked skyward, and J'onn and Ollie exchanged looks, while Batman gave them all a level stare.

"Aw, man, not you guys, too!" Bart complained.

"'Us, too'?" Chloe echoed, eyebrows going up.

"Yeah," Bart said. "I told Luthor that he was supposed to give up the goods since he's the one who called this thing, but he said he'd put tiny tracers and stuff in mine," he grumbled, crossing his arms.

Batman shot J'onn a querying look, and J'onn confirmed after a quick thought-check, "Yes, he would do that."

"After a warning?"

J'onn nodded once.

Batman shifted his shoulders slightly, silently recentering his balance. Unless J'onn missed his guess, Batman was finding that to be well outside the bounds of the behavioral profile he currently had worked out for the man. J'onn found that rather gratifying.

Chloe, on the other hand, screwed up her face and said exactly what she was thinking. "Idiot. Who warns somebody about something like that?"

"Uh, Lex?" Oliver put out there, like it was obvious, and to him -- and given their history -- it likely was.

" _Exactly,_ " said Lois, getting in the final word on the subject. And with that said, she walked away from them, heading back over to Clark and the rest of the lot of the 'troublemakers' as she'd so described them.

Oliver shot a weird look at her retreating back, and Bart said in an odd tone of voice, "I don't get it..."

"It's _Luthor_ ," said Oliver, straightening up and letting go of Chloe. "Be glad you don't get it."

" _Ohhhh_ ," Bart said, nodding. "Right. --Right."

Green Arrow slapped his forehead and looked at Bart like he couldn't believe the speedster wasn't getting it. Towards this behavior, Chloe simply chided, "Ollie..."

"Fine. Fine!" Oliver said, throwing up his hands. "We'll regroup at the 'tower and, I don't know, I'll order a couple dozen pizzas and soda for everybody or something, after breaking out the first-aid kits."

"Woohoo!" Bart said, punching the air, and zipped off across the park to tell the other members of the League.

"-- _Or_ ," Chloe interjected, taking his arm in hers and leading him off, "We could call ahead to Emil and get him to handle the first-aid, and have him place the order for us _now_ so it's there by the time we arrive." She pulled out her phone to text Emil and do just that, then hesitated. "How badly was everyone injured?" she asked with a wince, as she typed away one-handed. As they headed towards the edge of the park, J'onn and Batman fell into step behind them.

Oliver made a face, and admitted, "Not too bad. Mostly scrapes and bruises. The tasers sucked. Scared the hell out of Vic, though. Almost got him in the head with a metal baseball bat full-on."

J'onn and Batman exchanged another glance.

"You make it sound as though Cyborg dodged the hit," J'onn pointed out carefully.

"He didn't?" Oliver said, then, "Wait, he definitely didn't get hit, though. I would've noticed while he was getting us untied." He paused and frowned. "...I mean, I didn't really see what happened because me and Dinah were down at the time, but Luthor couldn't have rattled his braincase so hard that Cy'd mix up something like that." J'onn noted that the mistake had not been intentional; Oliver looked and sounding nothing but confused.

"Cyborg told you that he dodged the hit?" Batman asked Oliver directly, for clarification.

"...Well, no," Oliver said. "But, then how'd Luthor miss?" Oliver asked of them. "His aim usually isn't that bad."

J'onn and Batman exchanged another glance. 

"You were misinformed," Batman told him. "Luthor did not miss; he stopped on his own."

" _Why_ ," Oliver said, turning his head to stare at them over his shoulder, mystified.

J'onn stared back at him for a long moment, then told him, slowly, "Because it was a training exercise."

In fact, it had been a training exercise for which J'onn had personally enlisted Lex Luthor's assistance to set up -- which he had thought had been made clear earlier. Surely Oliver didn't think that he would have brought someone in to grapple with the League who would not have taken the exercise seriously, _as an exercise_ , regardless of whether it was a 'good idea' to have sprung upon the League without warning?

...Could it be instead that Oliver did not believe that J'onn would or could have kept their practice session well within the safe bounds of a training exercise only? But J'onn had been standing only a few scant meters away from Luthor over the course of his League interactions. He had both physically and telepathically watched and heard what Lex Luthor was thinking and doing even before it was done. He could have intervened had it become necessary. Were his judgment and abilities so undervalued with the League?

Or perhaps those thoughts had never crossed Oliver's mind in the first place, because Oliver merely frowned at him blankly in response.

"Yes, a 'training exercise' -- which you failed miserably at," Chloe said caustically to Oliver, poking him in the bicep with her phone. She was still clearly pissed off over the whole thing -- including J'onn's intentional wrecking of her master plans for future 'fake missions', such as they had been prior.

"Hey," Oliver complained, turning back to his wife. "We held our own!"

"You did not. You were completely outclassed and outgunned," Batman informed him severely.

"Only because he had J'onn on his side," Oliver argued grumpily. "If we'd had Stargirl laying down cover fire--"

"--But you didn't," Chloe cut him off, and Oliver turned and looked at her in shock, not expecting an 'attack' from that front. "I keep telling you guys you need more practice together as a _team_."

"Well, it's not like it'd be a problem if it had been the real thing," Oliver protested. "If we'd just known it was Luthor, we would've gone all-out, no-holds-barred!" he complained, and Chloe patted his arm consolingly.

Batman stiffened for a moment, and he tilted his head towards J'onn slightly.

J'onn gave him a grim look.

"I see..." Batman said under his breath.

"Yes, you do," J'onn said quietly, and it was clear from their carriage as they walked that neither of them was looking forward to having to deal with it in the slightest.

~*~*~*~*~*~


End file.
